Disquiet

This is the fourth episode of the Disquietude podcast of ambient electronic music.

The goal of the Disquietude podcast is to collect adventurous work in the field of ambient electronic music. What follows is all music that captured my imagination, and I hope that it appeals to your imagination as well.

All six tracks of music are featured with the permission of the individual artists. Below is the structure of the episode with time codes for the tracks, the spoken annotation of the tracks, interviews with two of the musicians (Jeff Rona and Patricia Wolf), and a brief essay about voice assistants.

02:07 Belly Full of Stars’ “Pattern 5”

06:20 Christian Carrière’s “Sacred Acoustics T004”

08:02 Femi Shonuga-Fleming’s “Ambient Live Looping Drone with Eurorack and Elektron Octatrack”

15:50 Jeff Rona’s “Vapor 6”

23:37 Jostijn Ligtvoet’s “Twilight and Fire”

32:02 Patricia Wolf’s “Snow Falling on Rough Horsetail and Dead Oak Leaves”

33:28 Annotation Begins

35:25 Patricia Wolf Interview

43:23 Jeff Rona Interview

46:11 “OK, Giggle”

48:11 Credits

49:10 Closing Music

49:36 End

All the music here happens to be by solo musicians. These consist of Belly Full of Stars (aka Kim Rueger), of Nashville, Tennessee; Christian Carrière, based in Montréal, Québec; Femi Shonuga-Fleming, a RISD student based in New York; Jeff Rona, a favorite film composer of mine, who is based in Los Angeles; Jostijn Ligtvoet, a cellist based in the Netherlands; and Patricia Wolf, who provided a wintry field recording from near where she lives in Portland, Oregon.

All the music heard here is instrumental, which is to say there is no prominent vocal part – or at least there’s no intelligible vocal part – and thus it’s suitable for background listening. It’s all ambient, which is to say it’s also suitable for close, concentrated listening. That dual sense of potential uses, both inattentive and attentive, both background and foreground, is the hallmark of fine ambient music.

Belly Full of Stars’ “Pattern 5” is off the album Aura: triplicaterecords.bandcamp.com.

Christian Carrière’s “Sacred Acoustics T004” first appeared on his SoundCloud account, soundcloud.com/christiancarriere/.

Femi Shonuga-Fleming’s “Ambient Live Looping Drone with Eurorack and Elektron Octatrack” first appeared on YouTube.

Jeff Rona’s “Vapor 6” is from his forthcoming album, Vapor, due out March 5, 2021.

Jostijn Ligtvoet’s “Twilight and Fire” first appeared, at roughly twice the length heard here, on YouTube.

Patricia Wolf’s “Snow Falling on Rough Horsetail and Dead Oak Leaves” first appeared on her SoundCloud account, soundcloud.com/patriciawolf_music

Thanks for listening.

Produced and hosted by Marc Weidenbaum. Disquietude theme music by Jimmy Kipple, with vocal by Paula Daunt. Logo by Boon Design.